Lesson 3Through the City, To these Fields: Eastern
European Immigration
by Kris Woll

Around the turn of the last century, a tide of
Eastern European immigration dramatically altered the ethnic and
religious landscape of Franklin County -- and the entire Connecticut
River Valley.1 Coming from many sprawling empires, forming
nation-states, and a multitude of provinces and small villages,
this new wave of immigrants practiced a variety of religions, spoke
different languages, and harbored varied loyalties and prejudices.
Diverse as they were, individuals were often referred to en masse
as "the Polish" in western Massachusetts newspapers and even census
records. That the immigrants themselves at times embraced the generalized
term on their own accord created a sense of shared identity among
individuals from very different backgrounds united in their "foreignness."2
While some of the Eastern European immigrants found work in the
mill towns of Holyoke, Springfield, and Turners Falls, many worked
as agricultural laborers in the rich fields along the Connecticut
River.3

The story of Eastern European immigration to
the Connecticut River Valley reveals that not all immigrants in
the Progressive Era landed at Ellis Island only to move into Lower
East Side tenements or Chicago's south side for work in the booming
factories.4 Like others that preceded them, immigrants
coming between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the
Great War settled on agricultural landscapes, performing agricultural
work, which for many was a return to the labor they performed in
their home country.5 The eastern European immigrant experience,
like so many others, is an example of the "push" and "pulls" of
immigration, a lens through which we can look at changes in the
homeland that encouraged some to immigrate, and at factors that
encouraged them to choose the U.S. and eventually stay.6

Nativism forms still another important element
of this story. Already-established residents discussed the threats
posed by "outsiders" whose language, religion, food, and lifestyle
differed from their own, while also grappling with the valuable
contributions these immigrants made to the area's economy. The grouping
of all Eastern Europeans into a pot called "the Polish" -- a practice
by native residents and immigrants alike -- provides insight into
the way "ethnicity" is formed, and how lines of nation, town/village,
and region seemingly disappeared amidst the Eastern European immigrants
to Franklin County.

Deerfield and surrounding towns in Franklin
County, Massachusetts, provide a particularly interesting example
of both assimilation and cultural preservation on the part of immigrants
and earlier residents, alike. The Arts and Crafts movement and Colonial
Revival of the late 18-and early 1900s, with their nativist undertones,
shaped the landscape, as did the preservation efforts, the activities,
and the creation of "Old Deerfield." These efforts competed for
attention in a landscape also shaped by immigrants from Eastern
Europe, as the three large Eastern European churches built by first
and second generation immigrants in South Deerfield demonstrate.7

Eastern European Immigration: An Overview

Between 1880 and 1914, at least 7.5 million
people from Eastern Europe migrated to the U.S. These immigrants
were part of what is known as the "second great wave" of American
immigration, in which 27 million immigrants landed on U.S. shores.8
Locally, Eastern Europeans first arrived in the Connecticut River
Valley around 1890, with their presence increasing throughout the
next two decades. In 1890, 90 individuals from Poland lived in Franklin
County; by 1900, the number had grown to 716 individuals from Austrian
Poland, German Poland, and Russian Poland combined. By 1920, 2006
individuals born in Poland lived in the county, comprising approximately
4% of the county's population.9

Immigrants from Poland (which at that time was
divided among three larger empires, Russia, Prussia/Germany, and
Austria) and from other Eastern European territories were most often
landless peasants, displaced by land redistribution efforts employed
after the abolition of serfdom. While suffering from poverty and
overpopulation, many peasants also experienced religious and cultural
oppression, sometimes through legal measures and sometimes through
violence. Many landless peasants migrated from the countryside to
the cities in continental Europe, either around their homeland or
in nearby industrializing Germany. There they worked in factories
or in mines before traveling to the U.S. The hope of higher wages
and greater security often pulled them to the harbors of New York
or Baltimore.10

Because most of the Eastern Europeans coming
to the U.S. were peasants, they were among the poorest "ethnic"
groups entering the country. Lack of money prevented many Eastern
Europeans from moving out of the port cities in which they landed
or the transit centers through which they passed; many found industrial
jobs in these locales. But the story of Franklin County reveals
that some Eastern Europeans eventually landed in rural areas where
they worked as agricultural laborers. Nationwide, only 10.9% of
"Poles" worked in agriculture; by contrast, in the town of Deerfield,
83.6% did.11

Eastern European immigrants to Franklin County
met the initial resistance to newcomers that relatively closed communities
traditionally express. They were different -- Catholic, poor, non-English
speaking, and agrarian in origin. Silences in works like George
Sheldon's History of Deerfield -- written as the Eastern Europeans'
presence was first being felt in the community -- illustrate that
some worked to deny their entrance into the community. Immigrants,
at least at first, were outsiders, not part of the town's story.
In fact, their presence -- and the increasing numbers of non-English
speaking, Catholic, agrarian immigrants on the East Coast and through
the Midwest -- inspired attempts to preserve a pure, "American"
past, an idyllic and constructed local and national history stressing
Protestant virtue and Anglo-American progress.12 Across
the country, nativism took varied forms, from acts of violence and
terror to refusal to hire or work with immigrants. As elsewhere,
nativism surfaced in Franklin County, evidence of which survives
anti-immigrant writing of the period.13

After arriving at Ellis Island or to the port
at Baltimore, many Eastern Europeans stayed in cities to work in
dangerous industrial jobs or moved to mining communities in Pennsylvania
to work in dangerous mining positions.14 In this labor,
immigrants found opportunities to make money, often more than they
could at home, and to buy material goods. But the work was long
and hard, and immigrant's standard of living among the lowest in
the country. Thus, immigrants tried to save money to protect themselves
against unpredictable unemployment. They also saved money to send
or eventually bring home, as many Eastern Europeans originally intended
to make enough money in the U.S. to return to their native land
and live well.15

The situation in Deerfield and the rest of Franklin
County varied from this urban model. Many of the immigrants to Deerfield
probably worked for a time in New York or another Eastern industrial
center, or in the mines of Pennsylvania, before coming to this area.
Those first to arrive were likely recruited by labor brokers seeking
farm hands to help in the Connecticut River Valley's farms, after
the catastrophic Civil War and booming urban areas reduced the area's
population.16 The immigrants came to work in labor-intensive
onion and tobacco fields, crops adapted as bigger farms in the Midwest
took over corn and wheat production and made New England's small
scale farming unprofitable. Recruitment began as early as 1880 and
continued through the end of the century. According to one study,
two labor brokers claimed to have brought 9000 individuals to New
England States for work in mills or agriculture in sixteen years;
by 1895, labor brokers left their trade due to a decreasing demand
for recruiting, as immigrants could find their own way to the jobs
through other connections.17

As in urban areas, initially many immigrants
were single men, though single women migrated as well. The men saved
the money they earned as agricultural laborers. They often lived
in boarding houses, many of which were eventually be run by an immigrant
family who could afford to buy a house (perhaps after working for
a time in the Valley or elsewhere) and let out rooms. Single women
often worked as domestic laborers, learning English and American
housekeeping through first-hand experience, living in the home of
the family they served. Immigrants who arrived alone often eventually
married either someone from the immigrant community in the area.
The work of both partners -- both before and after the nuptial --
contributed to the new family's attempts at financial success. Together
the young couple often saved enough to transition from tenant farming
to actual ownership of land, up for sale amidst agriculture change
in the area. The new wife would leave her role in domestic service,
aiding on the farm, in the fields and with the livestock, as well
as in the kitchen and with the coming large family. Influenced not
only by their Catholicism but by the economic value of many children,
large families were the norm among Eastern European agricultural
families. Many hands to help on the farm, coupled with the perceived
economic mobility of America, encouraged the large families.18

While the family was central to the social and
economic organization of Eastern European agricultural laborers
in western Massachusetts, another institution often formed the center
of immigrant communities: their church. Many of the new immigrants
found established Roman Catholic Churches in or around the communities
they settled in -- Greenfield, South Deerfield, and Turners Falls
all had established churches with their own buildings and priests
by the 1890. Around 1910 in Greenfield and Turners Falls, the established
churches began offering mass in Polish to meet the needs of this
new population, yet the growing Polish Catholic community in both
of those towns and in South Deerfield sought more than one mass
in their language. Due to fundraising and building efforts within
the immigrant community, Polish Catholic Churches began to appear
on the landscape of Franklin County; in1912 St. Stanislaus was completed
in South Deerfield, followed in 1914 by Our Lady of Czestochewa
in Turners Falls, and in 1920 by Sacred Heart Catholic Church in
Greenfield. Smaller in numbers than Polish Catholics, Jewish families
in Greenfield organized to begin their own synagogue by 1910, and
Ukrainian Catholics (Byzantine Rite) organized to build their own
church in South Deerfield by 1921. For both Polish Catholics, Jews
and the Ukrainian Catholics, actual buildings appeared several years
after an organized and practicing religious community developed.
South Deerfield's churches reflect not only that religious splits
did not only occur between ethnic groups, but among them, as well.
In 1930, Holy Name of Jesus Polish National Catholic Church was
built by Polish Catholics breaking with the Roman Catholic Church
over issues of lay involvement in the church and lack of Polish
leadership in a German and Irish dominated American Catholic Church.19

Places of worship were often the center of social
functions and served -- through services in the native language
and through informal measures like meals and holiday traditions
-- to preserve and transmit the immigrant group's culture. From
oral history interviews, we learn that women "followed" their husband
to his church after marriage; one woman remembers that for her that
meant moving from a Ukrainian Catholic Church to the Polish Catholic
Church.20 It appears also that some non-Polish immigrants
may have joined one of the established Polish Catholic Churches
in their community, feeling somehow closer to those traditions or
unified with the Poles in the area through the shared experience
of immigration.21

Once strangers in the land of the Puritan, these
immigrants and the generations that followed both assimilated to
western Massachusetts and changed it. One needn't look far, if driving
through Franklin County on Route 5 & 10, to see the evidence
and effects of Eastern European immigration on this place. From
farm stand names to church steeples, their presence and activity
through the past century is embedded in places and spaces throughout
the area, testimony to the way in which they and their descendents
continue to shape the landscape and culture of the Connecticut River
Valley.

Footnotes:

See Hilda Golden, Immigrant and Native Families:
The Impact of Immigration and the Demographic Transformation of
Western Massachusetts, 1850-1900 (University Press of America:
New York, 1994), and Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History
of Ethnicity and Immigration in American Life, (Harper Collins:
New York, 1990).

The use of "the Polish" as the label for
all immigrant groups is widespread in articles in the Greenfield
Gazette & Courier, in articles including "Are we to be Polanized"
(5-19-1900, p. 4) and "Aliens in New England (12-7-1912, p. 7),
and in publications including New England Magazine's "The Pole
in the Land of the Puritan," (Vol. 29, 1903/04). Discussions of
this from a second-generation immigrant's perspective are found
in Marilyn Kuklewicz oral history interview 1, PVMA Collection,
transcript pages 10-11; and William Kostecki oral history interview,
transcript page 1. For more on how ethnicity is created by both
immigrant groups and those native to their new destination, see
Kathleen Neils Conzen et al, "The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective
from the U.S.A.," Journal of American Ethnic History (Vol. 12,
No. 1, Fall 1992).

See the Massachusetts Entry within the U.S.
Census Records for the years 1880, 1890, 1900, and 1910, United
States Historical Census Data Browser (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/),
published by Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political
Research. Also see Long, "Agricultural Labor Brokers," (FINISH
ENTRY).

Daniels, p. 220. He cites the top cities
of Polish immigration as (in order): Chicago, New York City, Pittsburgh,
Buffalo, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland.

The usefulness of the "push/pull" concept
has been aptly debated among scholars for its deterministic approach
to immigration, reducing immigrants to masses moved by large forces.
Useful for their general overview but problematic for their tendency
toward oversimplification (erring in effort to prove their titles
well chosen) are Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted and John Bodnar,
The Transplanted. Roger Daniel's response to this debate is discussed
in the preface to Coming to America, where he suggests he is attempting
to put the immigrants at the center of his discussion.

A helpful starting point for a discussion
of the Arts and Crafts movement in Deerfield is Marla Miller and
Anne Lanning, "Common Parlors: Women and the Recreation of Community
Identity in Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1870-1920," in Gender &
History (Vol. 6, No. 3).

The 7.5 million figure is found in Hoerder
and Rossler for the areas accepted as Russian and Austria-Hungry.
Because part of Poland was actually under German control in the
late 19th century, it is difficult to accurately account for total
numbers of "Eastern European" immigrants. According to Sylvia
Pedraza, Origins of Destinies: Immigration, Race and Ethnicity
in America (Boston: Wadsworth: 1996), the "second great wave"
lasted from 1881 through 1930.

U.S. Census Records for the years 1880, 1890,
1900, and 1910, United States Historical Census Data Browser (http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/).
Again, at issue here are the terms available for classification.
Poland in the 19th century was divided among the Russian Empire,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the German Empire. Designation
for which part of Poland one was from was not an option on the
1890 or 1920 census. The 1910 census offered no "Polish" option.

An extensive and thoughtful discussion of
the background of Polish immigrants to America is found in Golab.

See Blejwas, and also Long, Grady, "Agricultural
Labor Brokers of Eastern European Immigration to the Connecticut
Valley" (Deerfield, MA: Summer Fellowship Program, 2000).

See Miller & Lanning; also see John Higham,
Strangers in the Land.

For more on nativism, Higham, Strangers in
the Land. The newspapers of the period attest to the use of nativist
language but do not suggest, at least in the period 1890-1920
that any vigilante anti-immigrant activity took place. This fits
Higham's thesis that since the turn of the century was a relatively
prosperous era for the nation, the immigrant threat did not seem
so immediate or dangerous, and thus violent nativist activity
did not take place. This stands in contrast to the precarious
1850s as the Irish flooded American shores, or in 1920, as the
nation's economy dipped after the Great War and the KKK revived
nationwide with vigor.

According to Daniels, p. 149, many Eastern
Europeans departed through the port at Bremen for the port of
Baltimore; The Fr. Basil Juli oral history interview, PVMA Collection,
transcript p. 1-2 contains recollection of his immigrant parents
coming through Baltimore.

Kuklewicz oral history interview 1, PVMA
Collection, transcript pages 9-10 reads: "Many people who are
of Ukrainian descent or some of the other close-knit eastern countries,
some of the Ukrainians, Hungarians, Czechoslovakians, Lithuanians
... they went, they wanted to belong to a church. We didn't have
a church at first when we came, so many of them passed themselves
off as Poles. It was easier to be a Pole in this Valley than it
was to be from the other nations that I mentioned ..."